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Loss of Death: Suicide in Videogames

"Lives don't exist anymore," says Tyler Glaiel, the designer of Closure, a 2010 Independent Games Festival winner. He's referring to the concept of limited lives, which he sees as something early games adopted to artificially extend their play length. If you ran out of chances, you would have to start from the very beginning. This hid the fact that an early game might last no more than an hour from start to finish.

In Closure, another puzzle-platformer, death comes easily and often. But, as in games from Crackdown to 'Splosion Man to BioShock, you can die and try again as many times as you want. Glaiel says the point is to let the player focus on solving the puzzles, with no fear of death.

Has life become even cheaper?

Nods to how easily and inevitably we sacrifice life are embedded in recent games both indie and mainstream. In The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom, you generate disposable clones of yourself that can be "whacked" off ledges to collect pies on the way down. In the Flashback-styled Rocketbirds Revolution!, you can infect enemy soldiers with a mind-control bug that lets you maneuver and then discard their bodies -- by having them blow their brains out -- once you no longer need them. And Demon's Souls, of course, punishes you for wasting those lives.

"There's no reason to be afraid," says Glaiel. "There are no enemies; there's really no consequence of dying. It's entirely a psychological thing."

If players of his game don't fear for their bodies, Glaiel says he can focus on bringing their fear out into the atmosphere. Closure is a world of flickering lights and empty black spaces. If objects and surfaces are not lit, then they don't exist. You can fall straight through them into the bottom of the screen, like a character killed off in the murky depths of a horror film. The puzzle in each level is to move the lights to create a safe path to the exit.

It is unlikely you'll finish the game without committing suicide. At some point, you will open a path you shouldn't have, and get stuck between surfaces; your only recourse will be to hit the "K" key -- the kill button -- and begin anew. The void comes in and swallows your character whole. This button is not a new concept; any game open enough to let you trap yourself needs to give you the power to suicide. But in Closure, it feels bad to take this option. Glaiel says that most players, when stuck, shuffle the lights around to kill themselves manually. For example, they might open a hole in the ground and jump into oblivion.

"They do that since it's more natural, and fits with the game," he says. In line with Glaiel's expectations, killing yourself comes with a psychological burden. Because the game is so tense, and the premise so existential (if you fall into black, you literally stop existing), suiciding instead of solving the puzzle feels like giving up.

You Don't Succeed

Even id Software's seminal deathmatch game Quake III Arena had a kill button at one point. As in Closure, it was a way for the player to get unstuck from the level architecture. Tim Willits, creative director at id, says it was removed because committing suicide became "like a cheat."

"When we added some of the space maps, we discovered that if you fell off, and eliminated yourself quickly, you could get right back in," he says. In contrast, suicide had been allowed as a formal technique by which Capture the Flag players could instantly return to home base in the event that their team's flag was stolen.

"The fastest way to get back is to kill yourself, eliminate yourself; and you respawn back to the beginning. What we were finding was that people would jump off into the pit of death, or would blow themselves up with rockets. It would take four rockets," Willits says. "If you hit kill, you lose a point. In team games, it doesn't matter; you're trying to capture the flag. [With the kill button], people wouldn't have to throw grenades at the floor and blow themselves up."

It's not that suicide wasn't accepted in Quake III, but that it was used unfairly to give the player's next life an extra edge. In id Software's games, life and death cycle through as rapidly as figures on a stock exchange. So why do the stakes still feel so high?

"When your character 'dies,' it's really that you failed," Willits says. "We had no intention of making people feel like they've lost everything. It's part of the challenge." Games like Doom and Quake are the very image of death. The former occurs in Hell; the latter in a Lovecraftian alternate dimension. But players dive into these morbid visions. This is because they are embracing victory, not death.

"It's not that we've ever been focused on death and dying. It's more that your character is eliminated," Willits says. "It motivates you to work harder."

Killing yourself is one way to enhance your performance. Competitive games like Quake III turn your deaths into a score. But they also give your deaths intrinsically greater meaning than a score. Being dead keeps you from playing the game. Your automatic response to being out of the game, moreover, is trying to stay in the game.

And you'll even hurt yourself to do so. Today, rocket jumping -- shooting a rocket at your feet so that the blast propels you high in the air -- is de rigueur for first-person shooters. The splash damage harms you, but the augmented movement gives you a crucial ability to escape a sticky situation. Performance is so important in the game that Willits says the Kamikaze item, which generates a huge team-killing explosion at the cost of your own life, is one of the game's least-popular pickups. It's a suicide with no skill attached.

A kamikaze is committed every few seconds in Every Extend Extra, a shoot-'em-up in which you repeatedly blow up your ship -- instead of firing bullets -- to trigger chain reactions of enemy explosions. Here, suicide is the one skill available to you, a careful balancing act of inviting danger and then exploiting it. Suiciding properly is how you extend your life -- which simply means continuing to play the game, scoring points, and advancing levels.

That's why our game deaths matter to us: They are ephemeral. In a sense, games are an inversion of reality. Death feels short, and life is the one constant.